Date written:

(I) October 3, 2016 – October 15, 2016 (12 days) (2,129 words)

(II) October 16, 2016 – November 28, 2016 (43 days) (2,549 words)

(III) November 28, 2016 – January 31, 2017 (64 days) (2,640 words)

Chapter Word Count: 7.318 words

Posted on FanFiction: March 9, 2017

/ — — CHAPTER 7 — — \

Motive

-o- -o- -o- -o- ( I ) -o- -o- -o- -o-

I guess this is what we trained for.

Inside a train cart. Weiss and Blake at her flanks.

You two go on ahead.

Brown and pink hair. Eyes of shifting colors. A weaponized parasol.

This one's mine.

Redirection. Pain. Anger. Being toyed with.

Then—

There is nothing new under the sun.

Yang woke with a jolt, swimming in a sea of darkness. It smothered her face, constricted her arms, but her legs were free to kick and flop like fishes out of water. Seconds of confusion, still crossing the boundary between dream and reality, and another three making sense of the blackness that encompassed her vision. Her legs stopped flopping and she used her arm to disentangle herself from the cloak that had been wrapped around her.

Though free from the cloak's grasp, darkness still greeted her like an old friend. Light shimmered from the window, dim but seeable, but it defined the night sky better than the room the moonlight tried to cross. Darkness, old friend and sleeping buddy, was all around her. Regardless, Yang used the limited lighting to pinpoint her location, though recalling the last moments before she slept would be enough to realize she was standing right at the entrance of her own bedroom. And it would also be enough to make her remember why she was like this, wrapped in a cloak and sleeping in the dark with sweat clinging to her skin as if she had taken a trip to a sauna.

She grasped the cloak tighter, murmuring her sister's name. She searched for the faint scent of shampoo, but all her nose identified was Valean wilderness, and why was she feeling so surprised about its utter disappearance? The strawberry shampoo was make-believe, her imagination grasping at something for comfort, running amok because the illusion was a better place than reality. Nevertheless, she buried her face in the cloak, damping it with sweat and the fresh tears that hadn't made it to her first cry out.

It hurt to be free from the delusion. It hurt to know she somehow failed her only sister.

She didn't ask questions, didn't wonder why or how, didn't think of possibilities that could disprove her sister's apparent death, at least not right now. Grief and self-loathing squeezed the joy out of her heart, numbed the critical-thinking in her brain, sent her tumbling into a cycle of hatred and depression. She felt like she had hit the bottom of a well and the climb back out seemed too tiring and tedious for her to even try.

And anyway, why bother? Why bother at all?

Yang stood up on wobbly knees and dragged her feet towards where she knew her bed would be. Her knees hit softness while her shins hit hardness. There was her bed. She let herself fall onto the mattress with a bounce, feeling the sweat smear across skin and fabric at every brief contact. Her grip on the cloak—her only memento of the Ruby she knew and loved—was tight and unwilling to let go. She snuggled it as she willed her mind back to sleep.

Dreams were the closest thing to illusions, although she doubted it'd be all solace and fun, because nightmares were dreams as well. She feared seeing RED.

Red like those Beowolf eyes.

Red like the eyes in the mirror.

Red like blood.

Red like roses.

… the emptiness and sadness that has come to take the place of you.

She shifted her position on the bed till she was looking at the ceiling, shrouded as it was in shadows. Sleep avoided her like it avoided insomniacs, and Yang was now uncertain if this was a good or bad thing. She wanted to escape reality, wanted her troubles to sink straight down into a dark abyss inside her brain that they'll never come back out, and though sleep was the closest thing to making this wish happen (if by removing she meant delaying, because such troubles in her life were inevitable, unchangeable, this she knew, but even that fact she wanted removed even for a little while), the nightmares that lurked inside her subconscious made her want to stay awake at all costs.

There was a small voice inside her making her stay in reality, telling her that to pull back now was akin to—

Don't back down, Yang! The Yang Xiao Long I know has never once thought about—

—giving up, to being weak, to reverting to that reckless, irresponsible little kid who thought more about a mother who was never there for her and less about her and her sister's safety.

And the voice seemed like a punchline as well, because it sounded so much like Ruby. So much like what Ruby would've said whenever she or their teammates were down in the dumps, either because of a mistake in a quiz or a news report that enforces the White Fang's genocidal crusade or a lead that came to a dead end… and various broken bones inflicted upon mooks who were too stupid to listen to their self-preservation and back the fuck out from the fight.

Looking back on that particular wild goose chase, the mooks knew what they were getting into and still decided to face her head-on. They had bravery in spades compared to the girl who beat their asses in two minutes. They were ready to risk life and limb for their boss, while here she lay, trying her best to avert from her problems rather than face them.

"How fucked up is that," she murmured to the ceiling, smiling while biting her lower lip, closing her eyes as fresh tears flowed down. She sniffed. Thoughts of Ruby resurfaced. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

She was a mess. No sense denying that. The cloak, the necklace, the ribbon… they didn't cause this turmoil within her. They merely broke away the facade she'd been meticulously building since she woke up on that hospital bed minus an arm. Her calm had been fixed together tight with the thought of finding her team, so that they could figure out how they traveled into the past and somehow find a way back to their own time. Well, now she found her team, all right.

Or at least what was left of them.

It was an avenue of thought she hadn't bothered going through. And with sleep being stubborn with its abhorrence of her, she had nothing but time to ponder about the one thing she should've been trying to puzzle over.

How did Raven get ahold of these items? And in that, why did she send them to her? What sort of message was she conveying with this, "abandon hope, your friends are dead" or "stop looking, they are gone"?

SSDD. Same shit, different delivery, as Uncle Qrow would say.

Yang sat up, face frowning.

Qrow would know, she thought, now sliding her feet from the mattress to the floor and standing up. Or at least have an idea.

Raven wouldn't have come here without a damn good reason. Her inner child gushed that she came back because of her, but that part of her was small and on the verge of going mute. She let that part of her have its round of crackpot theories before rationality took the helm. Raven had an objective in Patch. That much was certain.

Yang could say she had a few ideas on what it'd be, but she doubted any of them would come close to the mark. The best one to answer her questions was Qrow. He did, after all, reunite with her in the Usher House while she was busy dealing with the Alpha Beowolf.

With a goal in mind, she headed for the door. Her hand still clung to the cloak, and knowing that it'd be inconvenient to keep this up, she swung one end over her shoulder where it fell on the other, turning the cloak into a scarf. It covered her mouth and slapped her nose with the scent of Valean wilderness again. It wasn't perfect and there was a thousand ways she could do to make it look better on her, but that wasn't the point of it all. Besides, she wasn't in a fashionista mood.

She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out to the still-lit hallway. Only one foot made it out of the threshold when she paused her stride, eyes instantly glancing down and to her right. A plateful of sandwiches rested on the floor, the ones Qrow made before the conversation leaped into volatile territory. At the sight of it, her stomach went wild, growling and grumbling like an emaciated beast.

A whole day without food was taking its toll, especially after the rigorous morning she had. She gulped, licked her lips, and tried not to look too desperate for nourishment.

She scanned the hallway, somewhat hoping for a father or an uncle slumped down on the other side of her door, dozed off from all the waiting he did, but it was as deserted as her stomach. Her gaze returned to the sandwiches immediately while she tried to form a picture of events that led to this.

Whether it was Qrow or Dad or both, she thought as she sat down to pick up the plate, the gesture's appreciated. I should thank them later.

She might've also expected a note, written in Dad's chicken scribble handwriting, lying somewhere atop the mountain of sandwiches, but she saw no paper amongst the bread. She got a laugh, though, when upon closer inspection of the food, the sandwich filling consisted mainly of chicken.

It lifted her spirits a bit. Just a tiny bit.

Her stomach sent several jabs at itself, reminding Yang of a burning need to eat. The thought of doing so in her still dark room (why she had yet to bother to flip the lightswitch eluded her) was rejected. The breads were toasted to a tan-like brown, which doubled, if not tripled, the amount of crumbs that could drop from every bite. There wasn't a table in her room that had the right height for either standing or sitting while she ate, and although half of her couldn't care less about cleanliness as long as she ingested the food sooner, the other half refused to add more work to an eventual cleanup.

Breadcrumbs plus sweaty cleavage equals No, Thank You, capitals deliberate. Even when she had plans to shower after she devoured the plate and got ahold of Qrow.

She picked up the plate and headed downstairs. Halfway down, she gazed towards the end of the second floor hallway, where Dad's and the sibling's bedrooms were. She suddenly got this urge to check up on her younger self and little Ruby, but then her continued trek downwards cut out the view of the hallway, and the urge disintegrated like smoke. When she reached the bottom landing, more than a little eager to set the plate down on the kitchen table and begin her gluttonous attack, she heard the front door open.

Uncle Qrow tripped his way into the foyer. He corrected himself before his face met wood and closed the door with his foot. He wobbled in place, one hand clutching a paperbag in the middle while the other rested on the wall. He faced the floor, breathing more audible than usual, but Yang could still see a dark spot at the center of his left cheek.

She'd seen enough disagreements between the two men in her life to know how that came about. Aura protected Huntsmen from devastating blows, but Dad always had a certain knack for creating "lasting impressions" on Qrow whenever he went and did something stupid.

Looking back on what had transpired some hours ago, she supposed she should be more surprised that weren't more bruises on her uncle.

With a grunt, he dragged his feet on the wooden floor—creak went the old floorboard—guiding and supporting himself with the wall. Two steps away from her, he stopped, eyes on the sandwiches before panning up towards her face. He looked more haggard than ever, more beat up than she first thought. The swelling on his cheek was minimal, but there were traces of red, which could only be dried up blood, inside his left nostril.

His eyes, bloodshot and harrowed, went back to the sandwiches and then back to her face. "Got enough for two?"

One of her eyebrows instinctively went up. She wanted to say no—her stomach might've been demanding vehemently for that—but a look at the paperbag had her pondering something.

Eh, what the hell.

"So long as you have enough liquor there for the both of us," she replied.

Lord knows I need it now more than ever.

-o- -o- -o- -o- ( II ) -o- -o- -o- -o-

"The kids are in bed," Qrow said, and then chugged his glass to the last drop. "Tai also went about an hour later, too tired from all that's happened and whatnot. Me"—he snorted, gestured to the empty glass and the not yet so empty bottle of brandy set on the kitchen table—"well, you know me."

Yang rolled her eyes, munching on her chicken sandwich while pushing her empty glass towards her uncle. Qrow picked up the brandy and poured it into both of their glasses.

"Chicken and brandy don't mix," he said.

She swallowed before speaking. "That didn't stop you."

He snorted, shrugged. "I was hungry, I needed to eat. Didn't want to bother with making something else."

Yang grunted a reply and dove back into her half-eaten sandwich. She was torn between the priorities of her stomach and the priorities of her heart, both hungry for very different reasons. Her stomach was getting the satisfaction it yearned for, piece by piece, but her heart remained a barren, painful place for memories and questions to rot. She was bound to give into them sooner or later, and looking towards her uncle on the other side of the round table, she was certain he knew what was to come once plate and bottle were wiped clean.

He didn't even try to stall.

"Qrow," she said after wiping her mouth free of crumbs, "be level with me. What is it you aren't telling me?"

He raised a brow.

"My teammates' possessions," she clarified, keeping her calm in check, desperately clinging to a sense of rationale while rage and unbidden curiosity struggled to find the answers quicker than the current pace. "How did my mother get her hands on them?"

He shrugged, gaze to the kitchen window.

Rage took control and she bashed the table. Glasses, bottle, and plate blasted off and up before coming crashing down, as if gravity had momentarily forgotten them. The plate and glasses landed with grace, wobbling on their circular bottom edges before settling. The whiskey bottle, however, landed with none, whole body slumping on wood as its alcohol, already halfway consumed, vomited from its mouth as if imitating its victims who had overindulged. Qrow returned the bottle in an upright position with deliberate slowness and ignored the spill that slid off the table and onto the floor.

He stared into her eyes, unblinking, dark blood against raging crimson.

The joints in Yang's knuckles popped. Her fist shook where she hit the table, splinters jutting out around it like the quills of an agitated porcupine.

She closed her eyes—the first to begrudgingly look away—took deep breaths, and counted to ten. Then she continued towards twenty, just to be sure. Afterwards, she thought of Dad, she thought of little Ruby, little Yang, all three sleeping soundly upstairs and how much noise she'd have to make to have them wake up worried and confused.

Her clenched hand relaxed and her eyes opened up—now back to lilac—to look towards her uncle again.

He remained relaxed and nonchalant, using the twenty seconds of silence and calming breaths to drink till the bottle ran dry. Unlike before, however, his gaze wandered, staring at the liquor puddle below him, staring at the refrigerator at her right flank, staring out the window to her left. Every time, though, his gaze returned to his hands resting on the table, watching them clench and unclench, over and over.

The rest of Yang's anger dissipated.

Qrow was as much of a mess as she was tonight, and it was in no small part of what had happened today: the visit to the Usher House and her doppelganger's run-in with Mother of the Year (a pang of regret from the name-calling, but it was short-lived). This was just her own speculation, but she thought her uncle was still coming to grips with today, how a simple trip to the woods could lead to so much pain and worry. He probably expected discomfort, but never would he prepare for something of this magnitude in heartache.

Chasing the bottom of a glass had always been Qrow's definition of a safe retreat, and he was going for the bottom like a Vacuan in desperate need of water.

She looked away from him, decided to gaze out the window like him. Dark, heavy clouds canopied most of the sky. A diagonal tear opened in the middle of that giant canopy, bringing into a view the bright shards of Remnant's moon and the sparkling stars scattered about it that on some nights it'd be difficult to tell the bright dots apart, whether they were the last spark of a dead star or a piece of Remnant's shattered satellite.

Since when have I become this pessimistic?

"Ray," Qrow whispered before going silent again, eyes on the table where his arms were crossed and resting. In the dead silence between them, he might as well have screamed that word at her, the nickname he'd sometimes revert to whenever they had a discussion about the dysfunctional member of the Branwen family, although Yang would be lying if she didn't at least half-believe that essentially every single person who was Branwen by blood was dysfunctional in their own way. She could've pushed him to continue, but she held back, somehow knowing that Qrow would say what needed to be said in his own time.

"Raven," he tried again, his voice now louder but still whispery, "doesn't… look at the world the way the rest of us do. She and I had our Auras unlocked on our fifth birthday. My Semblance manifested fully five years later. Ray, in a month." He closed his eyes, scrunching them tight like a man blinded by a bright light. When he opened them again, he sighed as if he were letting out something monumental.

For him, she thought, maybe it is. Still… five years old. Like—

"Like you," he continued, but then shook his head. "I mean the you upstairs, in bed. Aura unlocked at just five years old."

She bit her lip, feeling the weight of that sentence. It didn't add up. "But I unlocked mine at ten."

"As it should've been, in my opinion." He scoffed. "But reality never gives a shit about opinions."

"But why, though?" Why aren't the past and my present coinciding? And… "Why would she do that?"

"Tai asked me the same. Told him I honestly don't know. Ray hasn't always been healthy up here." He tapped his skull twice. "One of… the many side effects she received from unlocking her Semblance."

So Mother of the Year was a lot crazier than Yang gave credit for. She had moments during her many searches in the past that Raven was off her rocker, moments where she gave up trying to rationalize the reason (or reasons) for her sudden departure, but such thoughts come and go like lightning, like an idea that quickly overstayed its welcome in her head.

Such thoughts returned with both vengeance and reinforcement, and it'd take a while for Yang to get used to having them actually linger around rather than get kicked out the moment they stepped inside her mind.

"She'd," Qrow said, pausing to shake his head and sigh through his nose, "she'd get visions sometimes. Of places all over. Vale proper. Shade in Vacuo. Yolanda in Mistral. The outback in Menagerie. Somewhere in Vytal, in Solitas." He snorted. "There, she said the snowstorm blew into her eye."

Usually with such remembrance, the humor would linger for a while, lifting the corners of the recaller's lips as sweet nostalgia ran its course, but not with Qrow. As soon as he finished that last sentence, the still-forming smile dropped like a scaffold that lost its foundation. He eyed his drink, lifting the glass up to chin level, watched the alcohol swirl about the edges of the glass's rim. He chugged it down quickly, eyes closed, and let out a long sigh.

"What exactly is her Semblance?" Yang asked, grabbing her own drink and mimicking her uncle.

Qrow shrugged, scoffed, shook his head. "I never got a direct answer from her." He grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass, but it offered no more than a drop. He glared at the bottle as if he wanted to slam it on the floor, glass shards flying be damned. Yang tried to stop him, concerned that drunkenness eroded enough of his inhibitions to not care that he might wake up everyone in the house, but fortunately, irrational bursts of emotion were in short supply inside her uncle's heart. He placed the bottle back—though not too gently—on the table.

"No one got a direct answer," he continued. "She prefers demonstrations over words, even though it would take just one to sum it all up: Portals."

Silence, Yang pondering, Qrow collecting his thoughts, which were most likely torn between wanting to explain and wishing to kill sobriety entirely.

Yang eyed her glass, somewhat wishing there was more whiskey for her to drown herself in, before pulling her hand back to her side, empty. The alcohol she consumed rolled around inside her stomach, and she could practically feel the warmth it exhumed in there as if there had been a bright, hot metal rod dousing after a trip from the forge. She liked the feeling; it combated the cold that was keen on slithering into her system as the discussion entered, Yang guessed, more sensitive grounds. She licked her lips before saying, "Teleportation?"

"Rare trait, right?" Qrow said in lieu of a direct affirmative.

You sound like your sister, Yang wanted to say but she shut her mouth in time.

"Quite bullshit of a power, too," he continued, pausing to take a deep breath and give a desperate-looking expression to the ceiling. "But it's limited to the size of the portal she summons. No portal, no shitting on physics. These things can be as big as a person and as small as her eye."

"Small…" She blinked, connecting the dots quickly. "Her visions?"

"Portal opening up in front of her eye." His forefinger hovered next to the space half an inch before his right eye. "She's been incredibly lucky as a kid. Cold wind and snow hitting her eye aside, it would've been just likely to have been magma, fire, sandstorm, seawater, the barrel of a gun, the point of a blade." He shook his head. "And it took her about a year to get those portals under control. I can't say with certainty that she saw things she wasn't supposed to see… but I also can't say with certainty that she didn't either. She wasn't talking, and I never really gave it much thought until after Beacon.

"She and Tai were a thing by then, and it only took a while before they got you."

Yang turned her gaze to the table, to the dent she made on it, and swallowed her own spit. Her hand, now resting idly on her lap, began to crack the knuckles with her thumb.

"I know this already, Qrow," she said.

"Do you?"

She bit her lip, continued staring at the cracks on the table. "... yes."

"If you do, you would've already had an answer to your question."

She heard knuckles popping, the sound coming from across her rather than below.

"Ray prefers actions over words," Qrow said, "even when, in the end, it leads to miscommunication. Tai and Summer got used to it"—he snorted, smirked—"after a lot of trial and error."

"Just where exactly are you going with this?"

Qrow looked at her, sighing through his nose, and slowly smiled. There was something about the smile that made her both confused and uneasy, kind of like one of those optical illusions where on one perspective she'd see a young lady looking away, and on another she'd see the side profile of an old woman.

"Long story short," he said at last, finally letting go of that enigmatic smile, "I believe Ray has more to do with this than any of us realize. I had plenty of time to think on it."

She furrowed her eyebrows, sat straight in her seat. "She's…"

"We're dealing with one heck of a time-fuck here, Yang. The things I saw in the Old Place don't just occur naturally. More so when we factor in you"—he pointed his forefinger at her—"Ray's knowledge of you"—he shifted the finger to point at the ceiling with the newly risen middle finger—"and the discrepancies between your time and this one." His thumb went up. Then his gaze, somehow, turned more intensely at her, like a critic actively searching for faults in an art piece. "You're an outright impossibility, more so now than ever. No offense."

Yang swallowed a lump in her throat, neither denying nor agreeing what he accused her of being. There was truth in his words—she was most definitely an anomaly if one were to look at her and the things involving her—but then again, she hadn't given this much thought than the rudimentary 'Am I remembering things right?' whenever major discrepancies occur between her past and this past. Case in point: Young Yang having her Aura unlocked five years earlier than Yang remembered, and she remembered that day in school too clearly to consider it as some implanted memory or something.

Right?

"What does it all mean?"

"Hell if I know," Qrow replied, "or rather I don't have the whole picture here. But most likely Ray does."

She blinked, and inside her mind puzzle pieces clicked in place. "And she's not talking."

Qrow nodded, lips tightly pressed against each other, eyes boring straight at her own.

"She wants me," she continued, pausing for a moment, "wants us… to figure it out for ourselves." She shut her eyes and shook her head. Her hand moved towards her nape to scratch an itch, while her immaterial hand shifted repeatedly between clenched and unclenched. When she opened her eyes again, her gaze was on the table, on the splintered dent she made. Why did it feel like that was a lifetime ago?

"How?" she asked.

"She already left us clues."

A moment to process that. Then:

"You mean she gave us a clue and you're just saying this now?!"

Qrow sighed. "You found those clues, Yang."

"... huh?"

Her hand clenched.

Both of them.

She already knew what he was about to say, but a part of her was desperately wishing she was wrong about it.

"The torn red cloak, the silver apple, the black ribbon. Your team's possessions."

She took a deep breath and stuttered it out.

"Ray knows something, knows what happened to them, but she hadn't said anything outright to either me or you. She left these things because she wanted you to know. Needed you to know. To have some of your questions answered and at the same time, ensure any new questions can only be answered by her."

Qrow stood up, walked over to her, and when he put a hand on her shoulder was also when she realized how badly she was shaking.

"I know my sister, and if she hasn't changed much over the years, then this is her roundabout way of saying, 'Come find me.'"

-o- -o- -o- -o- ( III ) -o- -o- -o- -o-

This had to be a joke.

"Does it look like I'm joking, Yang?"

She blinked at him.

"No, you didn't say that out loud," he said, on the verge of rolling his eyes but reeled it in, last second. "You're more of an open book than you realize."

Glaring, she knew, would be ineffective, but she did so anyway. Her anger had a louder, more influential voice than her rationale, oftentimes snuffing out the latter altogether in a barrage of shouts and shotgun blasts that'd deafen a civilian's ears within seconds. Even so, Qrow had grown used to her short fuse, able to either ignore it outright or douse it away within moments if the mood fancied him to do so. He'd always been the impenetrable wall in her life apart from Dad, someone whom she always failed to push back whenever red shrouded her eyes (both literally and metaphorically), so to see him take a step back and remove his hand on her shoulder, as if fearing he'll catch fire, it confused her. And unnerved her as well. As if he was unused to her tangible but relatively tame outbursts.

Of course he isn't used to you, she thought. The niece he knows and loves is a five-year-old sleeping upstairs, not a one-armed teen with anger management issues.

Qrow shook his head, eyes closed, before opening them again to look directly into her own. She detected some trepidation in his gaze and could only guess at the cause. Frustration still blazed within her despite the frantic pleading of her caged rationale to settle down. It mingled with worry, danced around with sadness, and rubbed elbows with confusion. None at least were consuming her entirely, but they were close. Very close, indeed.

"Sorry," Qrow said. "Did I hit a sore spot?"

The way it sounded seemed like sarcasm, but Yang knew her uncle enough to spot the difference between when he was sarcastic and when he was not. As much of a ladies man he was, he was terrible with women whose emotions gravitated towards the negative spectrum. Anger and sadness, most especially. She'd seen some of his flubs firsthand, too. That unnerving feeling got stronger now.

"No," she said, standing up. She needed to clear her head for a bit or at least not think about the Goliath in the room.

Come find me.

She bit her lip, gaze wandering about to find a reasonable distraction, and she honed in on the alcohol puddle on the kitchen floor. She stood up and walked towards the sink. The dish rag there was wet, but it would do.

"No," she said again, focusing still on the dish rag in her hand, both of which hovered above the sink, the latter squeezing the moisture out of the former. Yang felt driplets of water cascade to her wrist and drop soundlessly onto the metal surface. A blink later, she realized her grip on the rag was tight enough to make her fist shake and her knuckles bloodlessly white. "It's nothing like that."

There is nothing new under the sun.

She relaxed her hand and made her way to the alcohol puddle, feeling Qrow's gaze tracking her. When she got close, her uncle stood up determinedly, and she knew it would be about her agitated thoughts on Raven's message, the chaotic and incessant battering on her convictions like the pendulum of a grandfather clock that'd never stop ticking.

Contrary to her expectations, Qrow gestured for the rag, muttering, "I'll clean it up." Yang wouldn't, not just because it was a mess she made to begin with, but also because Qrow and drunkenness had at last come together in perfect harmony. His gait faltered in every step, and he'd be hardpressed to blame a leg injury when it was clear as crystal that he lacked balance even when staying still, swaying to and fro without his knowledge.

"I got it," Yang rebuked. She had always known her uncle to be a very coherent drunk, able to dash and dot his verbal t's and i's while the rest of his body suffered the inebriation like normal. Judgment, though, was still iffy, mostly because of how inconsistent it could be. Sometimes coherent, sometimes the opposite.

Sometimes utterly dangerous.

Yang knelt beside the table and cleaned up the spill. She went back to the sink to wring the rag dry again. An encore performance was needed.

Qrow had yet to say another word. Nothing about the source of her earlier anger, nothing about her thoughts on Raven's cat-and-mouse game, just sudden indifference. Yang, unsure if this was what she wanted, tried her best to ignore the gnawing his stare was doing to her spine. It was Signal all over again, when the bond between and niece and uncle was banned from his class, and scrutiny was never in short supply. Qrow was excellent at what he does, be it being the uncle who was there when daddy dearest shut down or a teacher who'd rather be hated than loved for letting his students slack off.

Here, she wondered what he was looking for. Instead of faults in her fighting stance, maybe he was checking for faults in her words, signs on her face, or evidence in her actions? Whichever it was, his gaze was difficult to ignore.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

But no…

His gaze was just that intense, no matter how high your resistance to it.

Halfway into squeezing out all the alcohol from the rag, it was swiftly taken away a moment after she relaxed her grip. Qrow held the rag with both hands and wrung it over the sink. One attempt had more results than the four or five times she squeezed the damn thing.

"Qrow," she said, almost a growl. Her eyes narrowed at his nonchalant face.

He snorted, eyes on the rag. He returned her glare with a lopsided smile—no more than half an inch of mouth upturning, but it was a smile, regardless. "Thought you could use a hand," he said, and then tossed the rag to her.

Yang caught it and sighed. It was meant to be a sign of her annoyance, but with it halfway morphed into a snort accompanied by a smile she could barely keep down, her eagle-eyed uncle (or rather crow-eyed uncle, haha, badum tss) would've noticed even if he were looking away.

"You," she said, "are the worst. The absolute worst."

He nodded, leaning his bum beside the counter. "If you say so."

They reverted to silence. Yang finished cleaning and, standing back up, threw the rag towards the sink. Qrow was still next to it, leaning back with his arms crossed, and if the rag was kind of aimed straight at his head, then it was no more than mere coincidence. He dodged it, of course, and he eyed her with a face that exhumed both unamusement and resignation.

Rolling her eyes, Yang rotated her chair till it faced Qrow and sat down. She pressed against the backseat, and she was surprised to feel damp coldness prod at her back. For a moment, she thought the rag she threw had stalked out of the sink and hopped onto her chair, waiting for her to sit, like a B-horror movie monster, but the next moment had her realizing that it was just sweat.

She let none of this be expressed on her face. At the time she sat down, her eyes met his unblinkingly, as her phantom limb continued clenching and unclenching with little care of the damage being done to her phantom palm. She could even feel the ectoplasmic blood leaking and dripping on the floor, and she resisted the urge to clean that mess up too.

Let the ghost custodian handle it. She let out a small smile at the thought. Nothing more.

Apart from that, blood meant an injury and an injury meant, more often than not, pain, and the phantom pain was there, all right, constant in its buzzing around the nerves of her stump that she was dreading it would be her companion forevermore. The floor was clean and her right arm was absent of any more injuries (the stump had healed quite nicely, too), and even she herself knew and understood that this was all in her head, as if her body were still running on pre-programmed commands before the amputation, a glitch that never got around to getting patched over. It'd be nice if it was gone, but the phantom pain was as powerful and real as any other wound she endured through the years… except this particular one was deep. Deep enough to make her suffer months after it had healed.

It's all in your head, Doctor Tushar had said to her while she was still in the hospital. It's all in your head.

It was all in her head.

It was all in her head.

It was all in her fucking head.

More than anything, she wished this whole day was all in her head, too. Just another long nightmare that plagued her in her sleep sometimes.

"What are you going to do, Yang?"

The question surprised her, although it shouldn't have. She slumped back onto her chair, the impact strong enough to make the chair groan and slide an inch backwards.

"Yang?"

She wanted to shut everything out, wanted to stop thinking, stop worrying, wanted to sleep and wake up back in her dorm room with Weiss, Blake, and Ruby frantically getting ready for another day at Beacon. Was that really just a few months ago? It felt like years, maybe decades.

"Yang."

She blinked, then sighed. "I don't know."

Qrow's feet shifted in place, but his mouth no longer uttered her name. He leaned back on the kitchen counter, arms crossing (both arms, her inner self sneered), and kept up his newfound silence, letting his eyes do the talking instead. She knew he was waiting for an elaboration, but like his odd reaction to her anger, trying to explain her reasons might result in the same thing. Not caution and trepidation—not entirely that, anyway; nothing that specific. She expected—

(and feared)

—an odd reaction. Because even after weeks of this, Yang would still oftentimes project her memories towards these versions of her dad and uncle. Ruby here was still a toddler, and not even the most talkative sort (although that'll change after another year or two, she knew) and projecting a teen with a baby was far more difficult than projecting an adult with a young adult. Yang couldn't really help it, talking to the men in her life as if she hadn't been displaced in time like that Ocean fairytale in reverse, but now it seemed daunting to do so, especially about a topic she had trouble opening up to with Dad and Qrow in her own timeline. It was never brought up, not even after she demolished Junior's bar, but they more than likely suspected her motives, maybe understood them.

The Qrow in front of her would not.

Or at least… she was afraid he wouldn't. It wouldn't be the same either, but was she certain of that? Did it matter?

Qrow grunted, tilting his head a little to his right. "I hope you aren't considering setting off on a dangerous mission to find my riddle-loving sister."

She tried not to wince.

"Are you, Yang?" He knew she was lying. Her decision had already been made, whether or not she realized at the time, but apart from what Qrow (or Dad) would react to it, she was also afraid of the road she'd be walking… or if there would even be a road. For all she knew, it'd be like stranded on a boat in the middle of the ocean, absent of land, absent of signs, absent of direction, just forced to drift with the waves and hoping no storm would come and capsize her boat.

"Yes," she said finally. "I'm just… torn on what I should do."

Her uncle raised a brow. "Uh huh. You know what to do and don't know what to do at the same time?"

"I mean…" She stopped, closed her eyes, gritted her teeth. No one said a thing as she spent a minute to organize her thoughts, make them as coherent as possible. Then: "Do you know why I went to that old house in the first place?"

He needed no refresher on what particular old house she meant and his overall reaction was a soft sigh. "Yeah. Tai found the broken picture frame."

Yang nodded, smiled sardonically, and said, "I never stopped looking, you know." Deep breath. "I hadn't found the answers I was looking for, but that first—and frankly stupid—trip opened my eyes to what the consequences would've been. So… I made a promise to myself that even though I'll continue searching for my mother, I refuse to let it control my whole life. Ruby and I would've died that day if you hadn't been there, Uncle Qrow."

His eyes narrowed a bit, and he grunted a low "I see."

"Now, though?" Now the stakes are higher. It's no longer just me and her. Yang's phantom hand clenched and clenched, and the pain from it was absolute and real. She doubted her head could be so deluded as to convey pain with such intensity at will. It, however, couldn't compare to what she felt in her heart, the insurmountable weight of worry, stress, and rage chained up to it, emotional baggages that did their best to pull her down into a dark, inescapable pit.

"Ruby," she said, "my whole team. She knows something. Knows what happened to them, and instead of telling me, she's being cryptic about it, she's—"

She bumped her fist on her knee. There was no actual force behind it. At this point, the events of today had sapped much of the energy she recuperated from her long nap.

"It feels like she's mocking me," she continued with a self-derisive snort. "Me and my promise."

Another weak bump to her knee, about as strong as baby Ruby's playful swings whenever she got overexcited.

"I'm…" She felt something trickle down her cheek, and she wiped it away immediately. "I just don't know what to do."

Liar.

She stood up on weak legs and slowly made her way out of the kitchen.

"Where are you going?" Qrow asked, as she stopped right below the doorway, her back facing him.

Another tear rolled down. She didn't wipe it, didn't want Qrow to see just how emotionally weak she was.

"I'm going to bed," she said, and was thankful her voice didn't croak. "I wanna just sleep this off."

She walked on before he could give out a response. It was rude, but she was just too tired to care.

Halfway up the stairs, she heard her uncle enter the hallway and call out to her. "We can talk about this when you're ready."

Not tomorrow, not the moment she wakes up.

When you're ready.

"I'll always be here," he said, and a small part of her wished his sister was the one saying those words to her, despite knowing that it was seventeen years too late for such wishful thinking. "I just want you to know that."

She did know. He had said the same words to her about two years ago. It was like deja vu except the tone and topic were not at all alike. How they resonated in her heart, however, remained as powerful and heartwarming as they were then.

She hastened her ascent, stormed into her room, closed the door behind her, and swiftly went to bed, where the pillow did its best to muffle her sobs.

Come morning, Young Yang still hadn't woken up.